Diagnosis
by scratchmarred
Summary: His vanity is a hall of mirrors cracked silent and still by bloodied fingerprints and the blink of a pentagram scryed price tag. [ SxS :: drabbles ]
1. Cadence

Four drabbles, subtracting themes from Plato's Tetralogies. Yes, I am that much of a geek.

For a particular someone who never thought I'd read the whole of Tokyo Babylon as a writing requisite anyway. Get well soon, dove. Mostly Subaru POV. Having never written for this fandom before, I claim the right to take cover behind the easier perspective.

-

**Euthyphro**

_- the nature of piety._

The wrist is too thin, and the balance weak. And he wastes himself, _child-sigil-of-heat-on-the-back-of-his-hand,_ with bleeding thighs and legs that are ash white to the knee amidst stillborn incantations and whispered offerings: Alpha and Theta, albumen and placenta.

Afterwards, when the deed has been done - when he has violated every rule of the summons, every virtue of his craft, every rite of purification – he realizes that he will never wield an ofuda properly, not again, not really. His new magic is _Seishirou_, and mourning cloth dipped in wine, the smell of cheap cigarettes and a wholesome religion of _rape_.

-

**The Apology**

_- a judgment of truth._

His vanity is a hall of mirrors cracked silent and still by bloodied fingerprints and the blink of a pentagram-scryed price tag. _Hesitant_.

He is _not_ beautiful when he comes to her rescue, her name lost between feverish lips and shallow praise. _Circumstance_.

He is _not_ beautiful in demi-monde addiction and unsavoury 'dates', in lies of –

" I want _you_. I love _you_."

-- in hasty, vile sex, the kisses viler, an afterthought of _heat_. _Pretence_.

He _is_ beautiful when judgment comes, her heart pinned to his door, the fragrance of it devil, and the devil of it cherry. _Owned_.

-

**Crito**

_- resisting evil by any means other than persuasion is evil._

"I don't believe you exist." They talk over wine, and dine over corpses, and sometimes their contradictions are a travesty of perfect, isolated apprehension. Concepts are never lost in translation, because words are just words and relative and obscure –

- "So you never killed Hokuto. She never existed either."

- and kisses are vicious torture, all abnegation, all _teeth_ -

"What are you doing?"

- and angels fall as they fly, for hands push and hands pull and two-eyes-now-one hungers -

"Converting you."

- and for the one night, it's just a black fairytale that never happened.

"…I love you."

-

**Phaedo**

_- the pursuit of afterlife_

It is always on trains, and always one station, and the truce of their meetings lies a dormant beast; in the end, they live the same way.

Subaru begrudges him sometimes the odd status quo: the blood and the bones, the death and the dice, the words and the wards; interdiction and _healing_.

Their _definitions_.

They are cigarettes glittering cancer infestation, death wishes _Wished_ upon the other, ripped ribbons to open Christmas presents, meaningless and deadly, apathetic and reversed, and you cannot defy their half-_kill-you_–half–_fuck-me_ glances separately.

Afterwards, when the train has _stopped_, Subaru can only read dictionaries.


	2. Astutely

**Note :** Many thanks for everyone's reviews! I make no purpose out of finishing the Tetralogies with this pair, perhaps not even this fandom. I suppose that if it happens, it happens. Flipping the coin: Seishirou's point of view.

**-**

**Parmenides**

_- of unity and likeliness._

There is but one fortune, and he pays to have it read, superstition rotting in knight errant charm and hands wavering wantonly over hot irons and mould strings, biscuit tablets and intestine-tied-wires; he takes it for a raw and painful thing, or a dormant beast screeching blood on his brain and spelling his name: obsession.

Afterwards, Subaru's hand is all a needle, empty flesh and bone beneath, and Seishirou knotting the meat of it around glass shards – regeneration, healing, curse and spell and jinx anew – until trueborn lines are all pale or red or scar, because cherry trees _make_ palmistry.

**-**

**(The) Symposium**

_- a cross of seven philosophies._

Seven days and seven steps and seven wards and seven wonders.

Mama teaches him seals and prayers and forlorn ambitions, though his hand is hot and heavy, bothered on the tea cup, and come sunset, wage night, he _bleeds_ her a Lady.

Later, he dines on guilt and repent, if another's, then the diamond thin lace of social savoir faire and tentative offerings: a paralyzed grandmother here, a dead sister there; they are all, he knows, sacrileges to the etiquette of a perfect kill, and so he compensates in seven words of courtesy: _Subaru, please scream for me, thank you._

**-**

**Philebus**

_- relativity in pleasure and understanding; the construction of complex things._

He has a preference for the Opera, if half-finished, poor executions foremost, and vague glissades of butchery in Puccini's work especially. He is the strident imperfection of every note's rape, the dull ache that haunts then is reborn as the wine bit tang of aesthetics.

Belatedly, he writes a note, or sometimes three, alternating French, Bavarian, any vicious tongue of Subaru's assured misapprehension, the same question lingering in musky pigeon's blood and heavier between them: _did I die tonight_?

When he steps on bones and feathers just so to break their white, he wonders, idly, whether he's being romantic.

-

**Phaedrus**

_- reincarnation; erotic love; a quest for rhetoric. _

When Subaru turns twenty, and the silence game creeps Crescendo, Seishirou acquires him the undying affections of a prostitute.

There is no scholarly dispute as to ethical standings, no possessive depravity beyond negligent fascination; instead, he is a distant spectator not without whimsical contempt in the tip of the glass, greeting the cadaver thin and so very white noise – stumbling, when Subaru is drunk enough for consent; suffocated, between fingerprints of intercourse; then innate, in screams of grotesque platitudes and absentminded terror, when among demented touches and the burns of the boy's first climax, she asks to be called Hokuto.

-


	3. Delusive

**Note:** I don't know when they developed either cohesion or sequence. But… I think it's fair warning so given that reading the ones before them would greatly help matters. Maybe towards the end – if I do reach their end – I shall try to put them in one single narrative. Hmmm…

**-**

**Euthydemus **

_- of logical fallacies._

" Look, don't bother – _don't_. I can't read a word." Subaru has a tutor for French, one for German, and a cohort of grammatical aides in first, second, third editions. Still, the languages elude him, mouth curling strangely and muddling an intense starvation in anonymity, then isolation. Mourir. Sterben.

Wordlessly, Seishirou dishevels the post he has brought, the shirt stained with stamp, his discourse of autonomy and disinterest. He _voices_ instead, all in pretty foreign words, "I love you", and beats Subaru within an inch of being a near broken semi-vowel amidst strong consonants. "Damn you, you make no sense."

**-**

**Protagoras**

_- the scholastic attainment of virtue._

The reconciliation of Seishirou's private affairs and academic distinction occurs only discretely, and only on paper, with stiff calligraphy and awkward penetrations of black on white and no red ambition, not ever.

And Subaru is never Subaru, but a collection of hysterics, typical and absurd and unscholarly righteous; the furies catch him just the once, with alphabet soup of mud and blood and bones on ofuda white, and suddenly the dance is en pointe: alone in Seishirou's apartment, hunting for that paper, ripping like the stitches on Hokuto's clothing, because, "You're not a vet! They thought you -- you're _nothing_!"

**-**

**Gorgias**

- _coercion versus elimination_

Their wager is scrupulously flexible, and set in the stone of their characters: a bas-relief of an old god fading, taking bruises for offering, wanton sex for vestigial gesture. This theology abandons them to some moral expenditure, and on his part Subaru tires of explanations.

Then the day comes when he must force Kamui's return among the living, breaking criminal wards of an absent psyche and luring some puzzle piece of will. The outcome drains him, and Seishirou's fixation with styling him a whore while petting his hair brings out the best in his eyes: witch hunt and pagan death.

**-**

**Meno**

_- on anamnesis._

The reminder: " Kamui."

"Whose?" Tokyo: all coin and tears, all rape and kill, all strained opportunity. Streetlights bicker, because the world's made of the Sakurazukamori and everyone else, two primordial sins, two imperatives, two sets of contrasting dynamics; one walks _against_ him, one _on_ him, none _with_. Subaru can't keep up.

Tripping breaks his chase, burning cement and blurred vision; he picks himself up, nine years on rewind: clinics and cat's hiss, pink bled pink and hot summers, mille-feuilles cigarettes smoked for Tokyo's Ending, and Seishirou's two steps and eye lost before him.

And you have to keep moving.


End file.
